Hey guys, I recently took over as Club Competition Director of my home brew club and I am looking for ideas for inhouse competitions. Is there any comps your clubs are doing that you enjoy participating in. Could be brewing, tasting, or forum related or anything else you think might be a good idea. Thanks.
Club Competition Ideas
- Thread starter Sayers
- Start date
Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:
Daybis
Well-Known Member
Our club does an Iron Brewer style competition twice a year. Club members think of random ingredients and write each them down on a separate piece of paper. All the pieces of paper are tossed into a hat. Three ingredients are pulled from the hat randomly during a meeting or at club party. Those participating in the competition are required to brew a beer with those three ingredients. They can brew any beer they want, but they have to use those three ingredients in the beer. For example, our most recent beers had to use belgian saison yeast, oak, and special B. We give brewers two months to brew the beer.
At judging time, all of the brewers get together. One by one, each brewer gets up, severs their beer everyone and discusses what they were trying to accomplish. Each person then judges the beer based on flavor and use of the chosen ingredients and gives the beer a score. The scores of each beer are tallied at the end. The winner of the competition gets a goofy trophy until the next competition.
At judging time, all of the brewers get together. One by one, each brewer gets up, severs their beer everyone and discusses what they were trying to accomplish. Each person then judges the beer based on flavor and use of the chosen ingredients and gives the beer a score. The scores of each beer are tallied at the end. The winner of the competition gets a goofy trophy until the next competition.
That is a cool idea, I've heard of it done with odd ingredients, ie. Lucky Charms or or other odd ingredients but I like the way your club just uses random regular ingredients. Helps brewers get off the "staying to style" wagon.
Daybis
Well-Known Member
We stick with regular ingredients for the most part. We do have some strange ingredients in the hat. Extreme ingredients usually turn people off, so we sometimes have an informal vote to choose another ingredient if one just don't make sense. Best example I can think of: Sriracha hot sauce. I added the salt to the pile because I thought it would be fun to force the group to brew Gose style beers. The biggest goal for our competition was to force people to brew with ingredients they normally wouldn't use. Like in the example I gave you, I typically wouldn't brew a saison, but my recipe turned out to be one of my more interesting and delicious beers of the year.
We do a brewer of the year contest where each month we have a specific style. Each medalist Gold-Silver-Bronze gets 3,2, or 1 pts for their finish. The brewer at the end of the year is the Brewer of the year and gets a shirt that says so. For our annual beer camp we do projects. Last year was SMaSH beers where each brewer got to choose his hop. The keg that kicks first is the winner of that competition. This year we did: "Session beers". Only requirement being that it had to be in the 4.5% range.
We also do a "silly judging" where you have to invent your own style and write guidelines for it then brew a beer to that style. There's up to 55pts allowed in that one, the extra 5 is for "creativity".
Other ideas we employ is a contest once a year where homebrews and commercial brews go head to head in blind tasting. You'd be surprised how often a homebrew scores out better then all the commercials....
We also do a "silly judging" where you have to invent your own style and write guidelines for it then brew a beer to that style. There's up to 55pts allowed in that one, the extra 5 is for "creativity".
Other ideas we employ is a contest once a year where homebrews and commercial brews go head to head in blind tasting. You'd be surprised how often a homebrew scores out better then all the commercials....
Similar threads
